Moments
by Xleste
Summary: Snapshot stories from the course of Castle and Beckett's lives, added to as the inspiration strikes, depicting moments that matter.
1. Still My Little Girl

_Author's Note: _Having rampant writer's block on "Simmer", so this little tidbit popped out. It's a scene set sometime after Castle and Beckett have started dating, so probably ahead of where I am in "Simmer" currently. The song Castle singing in this is Lifehouse's "Crash and Burn", which was actually featured in "Overkill". The look on Castle's face as he was watching Kate kiss Demming is part of what inspired this snippet. I wish my muse would come back with wherever she went with "Simmer". :)

_Disclaimer_: I do not own Castle.

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Jim Beckett was a little nervous, sharing the cab with his daughter to meet her new beau. Of course he'd heard about him – between the bestselling books, and the fact that Katie had been talking about him for over a year (usually about what a pain in the ass he was). The tone of the conversations had shifted lately around the writer boy, and then recently, a confession she was seeing someone. That was rare enough. He didn't want to seem like he was prying so he didn't ask much beyond expressing support, a hope that she was happy. Then, days ago, an invitation to dinner at a swanky loft with the Castle family.

He could tell Katie was a little uncomfortable about the whole thing.

Over dinner, he felt put at ease by the Castle family. They had a selection of non-alcholic beers and other drinks with a nonchalance that made the lack of alcoholic beverages not a big deal. Martha Rogers was a piece of work - still beautiful, and with a host of entertaining stories. He actually remembered seeing a Broadway show years ago with his wife starring her, which he shyly told her about. They talked some baseball, some current events, some funny stories of Kate's co-workers Ryan and Esposito.

Rick's daughter seemed pretty bright. Alexis reminded him a little of Kate at her age – though maybe a little more mature, come to think of it – seemed really responsible. He mentioned that at dinner too, which seemed to entertain his host a great deal.

He slowly relaxed over dinner between the good folk and good food. Stories started flowing a little more freely, and he was happy to tell some of Katie as a girl – though conscious of not wanting to embarrass her too much. To his amusement, he realized over dinner that Rick was a little nervous too – hiding it pretty well, but still a little nervous.

Post-dinner, the Castle family suggested Guitar Hero. He'd never played that before and it looked entertaining. Rick apparently really liked rocking all out. Plus, it was fun watching how surprised they were when Katie belted it out. He was proud of his girl. Martha, of course, could still kick ass, and Alexis inherited the full Castle charm and musicality.

Life taught him that there are a lot of moments that can turn a world on its axis. Rick was rocking out to Guitar Hero, especially with an audience. He was in full form, head banging, playing to entertain...and then he opened his eyes and looked at Kate, and sang, _"And if I fall…and crash and burn, at least we both know that I tried. And as I crawl, there's lessons learned, yeah they remind me I survived."_

Jim watched the look on Rick's face – the intensity in Rick's blue eyes as he looked at Kate, they way their eyes held as Rick was singing, and the lyrics between them. He watched his daughter go from laughing at the antics of the Castle family to stillness. The look on her face was so unexpectedly open on her typically guarded expression that its beauty took his breath away – as it had since the day she was born. It was a moment so private between Kate and Rick that the rest of the room might not have existed, and Jim was as witness to the moment.

Jim remembered a lot of moments of Katie's life. He remembered the day she was born, the moment the nurse set her in his arms, and he remembered smiling at his wife through tears. He remembered the first night she cried and he couldn't comfort her. He remembered rescuing her from the monsters in her closet, telling her stories until she fell asleep. He remembered the look on her face the first time she'd seen their baseball team hit a home run. He remembered intimidating Katie's prom date, and the way she looked coming down the stairs all done up in her prom dress. He remembered her face as he and Johanna left her in her new dorm room at college. He remembered picking her up at the airport on her return from a semester abroad in Europe, and how grown up she looked. He remembered, all too vividly, the night Johanna died. (There were a lot of moments he didn't remember after that.) He remembered the look on Katie's face, the plea in her eyes and the fierceness in her voice, that finally started him down the road to sobriety, and how she'd been with him every step of that long, long road. He remembered his mixture of pride and trepidation when she graduated from the police academy, so determined to seek justice and fight the monsters roaming the world.

And he would remember this. He absorbed the look in her eyes now, the way she swallowed, the way she looked at this writer. He felt his throat tighten, and he closed his eyes for a second to blink the threat of tears away. Embarrassed, he looked away and found himself looking at Martha, also watching them. She somehow caught his glance, and he saw the same insight in hers about _her_ only child.

"Where's the restroom again?", Jim asked, knowing the answer.

"Down the hall that way," Martha responded, a wealth of quiet understanding in the mundane words.

At the end of the night, he shook folks' hands. He paused in front of Rick, and smiled with warmth, his grip tight in their handshake an extra second longer. "Take care of my Katie."

"Dad…," he heard her half protest from beside him.

Rick just nodded solemnly, without his usual levity. "Yes, sir."

He watched Rick help his daughter with her coat, the way Rick pressed a kiss to her cheek and tangled his fingers with Kate's in a brief, subtle handhold, and the way both Martha and Alexis hugged Kate tight as though she were already one of them. They said a last round of good-byes and the door shut, separating the two families.

Jim started the walk towards the elevators. "I had a nice time, Katie."

"I'm glad." She tucked her arm in his as they walked the rest of the way to the elevator, silent for the moment, still his little girl.


	2. Dragon Slayer

The mid-level of their New York brownstone townhouse was dimly lit, the kitchen light left on for her, a note propped up against a mug in a childish scrawl. They'd moved in before their daughter was born, the eclectic décor reflective of both their tastes and the picture frames depicted the evolution of their family over the last few years.

A child monitor lay on the counter, and Kate idly popped it on, glancing briefly through the pile of mail accumulating on the counter. She could hear her husband's soft, crooning voice – ever charming – storytelling through the monitor speakers.

"And she's out there, roaming the streets of the city at night, keeping danger at bay with her magical badge. Mommy's slaying dragons, keeping other little ones just like you safe and sound from the monsters. And sometimes she lets Uncle Kevin and Uncle Javier help. Your mommy is sexier than they are though. You can tell them that the next time they come over to play. "

Kate smiled ruefully to herself, a smile that eased the tired lines from her face, and abandoned the mail and the monitor to head up the curve of the stairs.

She walked down hall past Alexis' closed door, noticing a brief pang of missing the redhead who was probably doing things to add new gray strands to Castle's hair. At the end of the hall lay their toddler daughter's bedroom, decorated with the fantastic imagery of a fairy-tale nursery complete with a skyscape painted on the ceiling.

Poking her head in, she said softly, "Dragons all put abed, just like little ones should be without their daddies spinning silly stories long past their bedtime." The near-sleeping child forced hazel eyes as wide as they would go, the arm not tucked around a stuffed bunny reaching out for mom.

Kate sank to her knees beside the bed, leaning in her face to rub noses with her daughter. She soothed the whimpered protest with a hand stroked over a baby-soft brow, hummed a soft lullaby, and a last whispered "Good night, honey."

Rick never got tired of this view from where he sat, occupying the nearby rocking chair. This side of his Kate, of all her multitudes of selves and so different from Detective Kate, never failed to make his heart clench. Another child to raise and love and watch was icing on the cake, and probably kept him from stalking Alexis at college and driving her crazy.

Kate tucked the blanket up to her daughter's chin, and caught a little sticky smear of chocolate on the child's neck. Wincing that he'd missed that, Rick said preemptively in a whisper, "She's still upset Alexis had to go back to college, so your dad came over and distracted her with making cookies."

Kate just shook her head, rolled her eyes, and replied softly, "No wonder she didn't sleep earlier. Sugar high. As though she weren't enough like you without one."

Tired enough herself, and a little too tired to scold more, she let Rick put his arm around her and help her up, sinking into a long embrace in his arms at the end of a long day. He reached out to shut the nightstand light off, scooted a block out of tripping range with a foot, and herded her off to their own bedroom.

"Time to put the dragon slayer to bed," he murmured when she was safe in his arms at the end of the day and drowsily falling asleep. He spooned up behind her, curling the bulk of his body around her slim frame and wrapping his arms around her. He pulled the down covers up to, savoring the minute adjustments they both made, listening to her breathing even out as she drifted off, ready to guard her sleep.

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_Author's Note: _Inspired by the scene in Season 2 "Tick, Tick", where Kate asks Jordan how she does it, and Jordan said that her husband put her daughter to bed, and tells her that mommy's off slaying dragons. I imagine Castle, storyteller that he is, doing much the same - and Kate's as much a heroine in their daughter's eyes as she is in Castle's.


	3. Memoir

Rick was in his 50s when he finally got his memoirs published, though the idea had been knocking around in his head for at least a decade. It started when Alexis' kids wanted stories of their non-fictional life from him and "gram". (Meredith refused to be referred to as "grandmother", so she was just "Mer".) Kate rolled her eyes whenever he teased her about what he'd put in the autobiography. He wouldn't let her read it while he was writing it, and she was pretty sure it was as much fiction as non-fiction. She wasn't too pleased about the idea as she still guarded as much of their privacy as she could, and he spent more years charming her into letting him write it than he did trying to get her to take him seriously after meeting her. (And there were times she still didn't take him seriously.)

Pre-release, Alexis dealt gracefully with the constant and irritating phone calls from Meredith regarding just how much she was featured in it. (It was hard to tell whether Meredith was afraid of too much or too little. At one point, a certain "tops" list was mentioned as potential inclusion, but Alexis firmly yet lovingly reminded her mother of the fact that her stepmother was still perfectly capable of dislocating a perfect nose in a single blow.)

In the end, the book delighted Richard Castle fans (partly for the fun party details, the who's who of his life, the famous breasts he'd signed, the poker games played) and turned into another New York times bestseller, and his first in non-fiction. It also delved into the crime cases he'd been key to solving (another Kate eyeroll when she read those) and his years moonlighting with the NYPD. Fans were dying (thankfully not literally) to see how much of the Nikki Heat books were fact, not fiction.

Some of his life was as great as his fiction. His readers were entranced by the story of the serial killer who thought Nikki Heat was real and left a trail of bodies for Detective Beckett, relived with him the fear he'd felt when he thought Kate's apartment was blown up, cheered his heroic breaking down of her apartment door to find her still alive.* (Critics wondered if he exaggerated the part where he shot the gun out of the serial killer's hand, just in time to save his future wife's life – until it was corroborated by an enterprising reported who tracked down the closed FBI files related to Scott Dunn, deceased after serving life in a federal penitentiary.)

Out of respect for his wife, and the fact that he didn't want to sleep on the couch, he kept many of the intimate details of their life out of the printed word and carefully controlled what was revealed about their family. But what the critics actually lauded was that beneath the sensationalism and glamor, the mayhem and murder, the cheese and advice, his memoir was undeniably a love story.

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_Author's Note:_ Still having challenges with my muse and the next chapter of Simmer, but in the meantime, these little bits are dribbling out, and I'm liking them. :) After I post, then I arrange chronologically. :) Thank you, very deeply, for the reviews. No matter how many times I say it, it still feels hard to convey the little lift to my spirits I get and how very encouraged I feel to see them.

*Refers to events in Season 2, in the episodes "Tick, Tick", and "Boom".

_Author's Note 06/26/2010: _After a review from IMW, I actually took a stab at trying to write excerpts from his autobiography, and it's now it's own story titled "Memoir".


	4. End of Life

_Author's Note: _Anything new added to this story ends up chronologically before this last piece, so I rearrange them after I post a chapter. Sorry if the "new chapter updates" and the link to the newest chapter in this story don't synch up!

* * *

She stayed out at the Hamptons house in the summers, preferring the privacy in the last years. Her hair went white years ago, though her eyes were still bright and keenly sharp, letting few details go by her. (Rick's slightly-self-aggrandizing memoir-turned-love-story mentioned that he'd been attracted to her for her haunting good looks, and she was still described as striking - something only those who'd been on the receiving end of a beat-down during a sparring match even later in life found ironic.)

She was still involved in various causes, taking her battles to the state legislature for tougher and better laws. Hers was not a voice you wanted to hear swearing in the Mayor's office, still raising hell. Between her years of service on the force, the homicide cases closed, the series of bestselling books "loosely" based on her, Kate Beckett Castle was still a voice in New York political circles to be reckoned with and had been for three decades.

Her private life stayed mostly that – private. (The same couldn't be said of one of their granddaughters, lauded as the Audrey Hepburn of her generation.)

Sometimes she let her memory range over the decades together, from their first meeting, their wedding, the birth of their first child, and their second, Alexis' college graduation, and standing up at her wedding. She remembered comforting him when Martha died and grieving the Grand Damn who had loved life so very fully. She still ached when she thought of the grandson they'd lost to a senseless car accident, the day in court facing the man who'd hired her mother's killer and the way Rick had been her silent support throughout her testimony, the loss of her own father. She remembered their travels through the world from their first anniversary jaunting through Europe to when they'd celebrated his 80th with a birthday bash in New York and then took their grandkids to climb the Great Wall of China with them. There were a lot of good memories, times they laughed so hard her face ached, and times when the joy was quieter - and always always the steadiness of how much love there was even when they fought as crazy as they made love.

And she remembered the day he'd gone. She'd held his hand…and rolled her eyes when he said that he was glad he was going first, because he didn't want to be the one to live without her. When he'd gone, she'd wanted to rail at the unfairness of the world that she had to live without him. The world got a bit darker for her after that.

Life had the annoying – and beautiful - way of continuing. She read his books – not unaware of the irony that they'd helped her survive her mother's death years before. And this time, there were grandchildren to read his books to, looking up at her with _his_ eyes.

And so she bided a little while longer, matriarch of the Castle clan, dispensing wisdom and love in equal measures, teaching the lessons of integrity and passing on some of Rick's sense of fun.

Alexis drove out to the house one gorgeous summer day, coming to check on Kate who'd been quieter on their last call. She walked through the house to the back veranda, where she knew Kate loved to sit.

At first Kate looked like she was sleeping, resting peacefully in the hammock on the back porch, a Richard Castle book in her lap. Alexis recognized it instantly with a glimmer of amusement, the memory of its launch party still fresh in her mind, as much as its dedication to "the extraordinary KB".

In some ways, she wasn't surprised Kate wouldn't wake. It somehow fit. Alexis sat heavily on a nearby rocker and just let her tears fall.

* * *

_*Author's Note_: IMW's story got me thinking. One might ask why I'd end this on this note – but I think in this life we take the bitter with the sweet. Sometimes I have the line from a song, "One of us will die inside these arms", and it's just so darned achingly poignant because there's a truth to it. I hope what's glimpsed at the end is the truly great life they had. The poet David Whyte talks about loving in the face of the "bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat", and Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes that a part of each man and each woman wants to deny that of every relationship death must have his or her share. I think that the human ability to love anyway, in spite of that inevitability, is something "even the gods bow down to." And so there's a sort of bow to that in this.


End file.
